Yari Golden Castaño first learned about the moon, planets and space when her Mexican grandmother, Barbarita, taught her how to read the encyclopedia. Golden Castaño was nicknamed “Little Astronaut” in her family because her mother would dress her in astronaut jumpsuits. In third grade, she read a book that said that to be an astronaut, you had to be a teacher, a doctor or an engineer.
“It was something that was instilled in my head from a young age and that’s what I really wanted,” Golden-Castaño said. “I never thought I’d be a doctor, and I never thought I’d want to be a teacher. I loved building things and I was good at physics and math, so I decided I wanted to be an engineer.”
A dream postponed
Despite her STEM inclinations, Golden-Castaño didn’t have any real-world STEM experience until she was in the eighth grade, when she was selected for the Graduated with Excellence in Teaching (GATE) program. She grew up in an area of Southern California where funding for STEM activities was lacking. Through the GATE program for advanced science students, she saw the concepts she learned in the classroom come to life.
“Not everyone can understand how things work just by reading a textbook. Personally, you have to visualize it,” she said. “If I hadn’t been selected for this program, I would not have known I could have these kinds of hands-on activities,” she said.
For Golden Castaño, the GATE program was difficult not because of the STEM concepts covered, but because of the English language barrier. By the time she reached high school, she was better able to express herself and excelled in all her Advanced Placement classes. However, when she asked one of her teachers how she could become an astronaut, he laughed at her. “Are you high? What are you studying? Girls can’t be engineers or astronauts,” he said. Other teachers agreed with him and encouraged Golden Castaño to attend a liberal arts college and suggested she learn Spanish in case she changed her mind.
“His answer made me feel stupid,” Golden-Castaño said. “At that point, I decided to stop telling people that I wanted to be an astronaut one day. I was going to go to engineering school and focus on getting my degree. I had never even considered dropping out of engineering.”
Mission to Mars
After earning her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Smith College in 2010, Golden Castaño joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory as a data analyst on the Air Traffic Control Systems Development Team, where she was surrounded by others who shared her dream of space travel.
“Shortly after I arrived, I heard that NASA was recruiting astronauts and many of my colleagues had applied,” Golden-Castaño said. “It gave me hope and inspired me to talk about my dream again.”
When Mars One, a mission to build the first human colony on Mars, was announced in 2013, Golden-Castaño jumped at the chance to get a one-way ticket there. By 2015, the original 200,000 applicants had been whittled down to 100 people: 50 men and 50 women; Golden-Castaño’s name was on the list of female candidates. (The Mars 100 was ultimately meant to be narrowed down to 24 finalists, but the company funding the mission filed for bankruptcy in 2019.)
The supportive lab community and the anticipation of the Mars adventure were the perfect combination for Golden-Castaño to share her passion for space, and she began giving talks at schools around Boston, and even in Mexico, about her dreams of becoming an astronaut and her journey to becoming an engineer.
“Having the Mars card has given me a broader reach,” Golden-Castaño said. “Now I have something to share with my students. When I saw their reaction, I realized, ‘Wow, you’re one of us, you’re a girl, you followed your dreams even when everyone else told you it wasn’t possible,’ and I had their attention, so I realized it wasn’t enough to just talk.”
Golden Castaño served as vice president of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Smith College during her senior year and participated in various educational activities. She moderated four workshops for SWE’s annual Engineering Demo Day. Although the event was successful, she thought it would be her first and last time participating in an educational activity.
“I’m really shy,” Golden-Castaño explained. “I didn’t want to be in front of anyone, much less have them rely on me for information.”
During her time at the lab, she engaged in community service work, volunteering at food pantries in Boston, cleaning up the Charles River and helping local farms prepare land for cultivation, but now that she’s the face of the Mars One mission, she feels called to get back into education and tell her story.
Golden-Castagno volunteered at a Girls Day of Engineering event run by her colleague Damaris Topel. A few years later, when Golden-Castagno took over the event, she began to notice that girls in grades 5-8 were bored with the content and complaining that they had already attended such workshops.
“Their response made me realize that they have access and opportunities,” Golden Castaño said. “They are the daughters of our engineers and they go to a school where teachers can buy materials to practice their demonstrations.”
Ready to explode
Frustrated by this reality and remembering the limited opportunities she had as a student, Golden-Castaño organized a spinoff of the event in May 2017 called “Girls Space Day Adventure.” Along with other volunteers, she worked with women from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics to gather eight space-related practical demonstrations and bring them to MIT. To recruit participants, they reached out to schools in the greater Boston area, aiming to reach underprivileged students (especially but not exclusively girls) who could easily commute to the MIT campus by subway. The performance was attended by about 60 students, both male and female. However, it proved difficult to replicate the event, as many volunteers have since left the lab. Because the demonstrations are in the form of standalone presentations, smaller versions of Girls Space Day Adventure were held at local and nearby schools.
In parallel, Golden Castaño has launched an eight-week field trip for second- and third-graders called “Mission to Mars.” Each week will focus on a different aspect of what it takes to get to Mars, such as living in Martian gravity, designing a suitable habitat, and growing vegetables that will thrive in Martian soil. On the final day, students will don space suits and navigate an obstacle course while communicating with their “ground control” partners by walkie-talkie.
Helping Golden-Castaño get this outreach going is her husband, R. Daniel, whom she met through Mars One and helped her build many of the demos even before he began working as a contractor for the lab’s laser communications group.
After organizing the Girls Space Adventure Day and the Mars mission, Golden-Castaño had the idea to make outreach more self-sustaining in the long term by setting up demonstrations where volunteers could be sent to different schools. From that idea, the Girls Innovation Research Lab (GIRL) was born at Lincoln Laboratory in 2019. The program aims to create independent, hands-on workshops on diverse STEM topics, encourage the participation of underrepresented girls (even though the events are coeducational), and support women and lab staff who are willing to volunteer as STEM role models.
“GIRL’s goal is to inspire girls to create technology that benefits their communities and to give them the skills, knowledge, resources and confidence to pursue STEM. “Another goal for me is to inspire women to volunteer and learn about subjects that they may not be familiar with and then teach them,” Golden-Castaño said, adding that she had to step out of her comfort zone to do so.
Large space
Since its inception, GIRL has hosted approximately 50 workshops, engaging more than 300 students. Staff from the institute’s Communications and Outreach Office have developed relationships with several schools in the Greater Boston area; organizations such as Brookview House, Girls Inc., Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and House of Hope; and events such as Science on State Street and the Christa McAuliffe Center STEM Week Open House. GIRL provides volunteers with the resources and materials they need for their performances.
“We have a group of smart women in our lab who have knowledge to share. Volunteers can propose demonstrations on a topic of their choice and present them themselves to schools and organizations. We now have a full ‘menu’ of shows we can run at any time. It was exciting to expose the kids to these hands-on activities that they would not have had a chance to experience outside of the GATE program.”
The workshops span a wide range of subjects, including programming, mechanical and electrical engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, optics, forensics, planetary science, and chemistry. A Scratch programming workshop using the Makey Makey Board teaches students how to build circuits and program musical instruments that play when they touch the keys on the board. In an artificial intelligence-themed workshop, students played a guessing game and placed items such as candies to simulate the behavior of decision tree algorithms. Workshops on cybersecurity and internet safety teach students how to recognize the risks of exposing personal information online, how to decrypt messages, how to unlock physical locks, and how to understand internet protocols. In a workshop on lighting fundamentals, students build light-emitting diode (LED) color-mixing crystals and use diffraction gratings to observe how light is split into different colors at different angles.
Recently, GIRL launched a chemical reaction workshop where students created their own color reactions and learned about chemiluminescence. The latest workshop focused on mechanics, with students tracing hand impressions and building mechanical arms out of cardboard, using strings to move fingers in a similar way that a puppeteer controls a puppet’s limbs. Students also attached LED strips to the back of the arms. Golden Castaño wrote the code that made the lights change color depending on which finger they bent.
For Golden-Castaño, one of the most rewarding aspects of GIRL is capturing the attention of students, especially those who may have seemed disinterested at first.
“We’ve seen so many classrooms where kids are rude and interrupt us,” Golden-Castaño said, “and then we start a demonstration and even the loudest kid pays attention and asks relevant questions. It’s rewarding to see them so engaged with the program.”
To keep the momentum going, every GIRL workshop sends students home with links or follow-up materials that provide additional learning resources. Volunteers also share their own educational and career journeys to help students envision their future paths.
“One of the important lessons I’ve learned is that kids don’t want to hear that you knew from the beginning what you wanted to be when you grew up and that everything was fine,” Golden-Castagno says. “For many students, GIRL is their first real experience with STEM or their first opportunity to know that they can do STEM, so I’m always honest with them. I tell them, I didn’t get an A, so it’s not too late to start today.”
In addition to low interest in STEM education, some GIRL participants also face a language barrier, something Golden Castaño knows all too well. Though she is fluent in conversational Spanish, she lacks the language’s terminology and has tried to translate lessons taught in English into Spanish. Earlier this year, she prepared a presentation in Spanish for a chemistry conference.
to infinity and beyond
Five years later, the GIRL program continues to thrive, overcoming challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic by hosting online workshops and delivering pre-made kits and other materials to classrooms.
“We have a comprehensive system in place,” she said, “but we would like to see another surge in participation from new volunteer groups doing new protests.”
Noting the diversity of work taking place at the lab across a range of research and development disciplines, Golden Castaño envisions some topics for upcoming workshops, including smart fabrics, biochemistry for threat identification, underwater laser communications, rapid prototyping, technological solutions to climate change, and AI-enabled safety. The possibilities are endless.
Golden Castagno, who works with the team that leads Girls Space Day Adventures on the MIT campus, also has an idea for an app that would pair volunteers with classes in a more automated, targeted way. The app would feature volunteer profiles outlining their STEM backgrounds, the demonstrations they lead, and their available schedules, which teachers can scroll through to determine who would complement their class’s curriculum. For example, a teacher in an environmental science class might recruit a volunteer to lead a workshop on weather stations.
“GIRL has been a truly amazing journey, and I’d like to thank everyone who made it possible. I’m grateful for the support of the many volunteers, faculty, team leaders, and the Community Outreach Office,” said Golden-Castagno. She is currently a member of the lab’s Systems Engineering Group, where she focuses on assembling, integrating, and testing laser communications systems.
While Golden-Castaño is always looking for the next opportunity to pursue his dream of becoming an astronaut, he sees his work at the lab as foundational to the future of space exploration: “I’m working on technologies that will enable future human spaceflight missions.”
